On this date in 1721, a woman named Catharina Margaretha Linck was beheaded with a sword in the Halberstadt fishmarket for homosexuality.

One projects modern sexualities into the past at peril but as Rictor Norton concludes, “there seems no reason why we should not agree with the lawyers at the trial, who defined her as a fricatrice, a ‘rubbing woman’ — in other words, a lesbian.”

Linck (English Wikipedia entry | German) busted out of the anonymous drudgery due an orphan seamstress and into historical monographs by joining an itinerant Quaker movement called the “Inspirants”.

Under those circumstances her habit of going about in men’s clothing might really have been an expedient to elude the male gaze just like Joan of Arc.

It was also a door into the male world: the gender-bending “Anastasius Rosenstengel”, as she called herself, proceeded to enlist herself by turns in the Hanoverian, Prussian, and Polish armies and fight in the War of Spanish Succession.

By 1717 a demobilized Linck was in Halberstadt, several years gone from the martial life but again passing as “Anastasius” in masculine attire … which was also the case when she married 18-year-old Catharina Margaretha Mühlhahn in St. Paul’s church. Who knows how quickly or slowly the young wife grasped the true situation: Anastasius used a homemade leather strapon dildo in the marital bed to such effect that “whenever she [Linck] was at the height of her passion, she felt tingling in her veins, arms, and legs.” (Source)

According to surviving court records, “Anastasius” during soldiering days had delighted in the habit of seducing or hiring women for the same usage. But seemingly the younger Catharina experienced enough physical discomfort from the object that she mentioned it to her mother, who blew the whistle on the whole arrangement after a dramatic domestic confrontation wherein she ripped off her “son”-in-law’s clothes to reveal the artificial cock.

There needs to be a movie made about Catharina Linck. In the meantime, German speakers have access to a 2004 biography, In Männerkleidern. Das verwegene Leben der Catharina Margaretha Linck alias Anastasius Rosenstengel, hingerichtet 1721 or the 2015 historical novel Rosenstengel (review).